The Anti-War Party’s mutually conflicting standards of “certainty”

According to the Catholic Catechism, the harm a country faces from an aggressor must be “certain” before the country may defend itself. I have argued that this idea, if taken literally, is a formula for endless appeasement and surrender. A John Leo column about the left’s attacks on President Bush over the war unexpectedly brings out yet another reason why this is so. Leo writes:

Complaints about Bush’s lack of ambivalence are far more curious. He is accused in various journals of “a questionable certainty” and of failing to realize that “moral certainty, for the most part, is a luxury of a closed mind.” David Brooks of The Weekly Standard sardonically calls this America’s “certainty crisis.”

Thus, on one hand, the Church declares that a country shall not wage war to defend itself from a possible aggressor unless “the damage [to be] inflicted by the aggressor on the nation … [is] … certain.”

But, on the other hand, the secular-liberal culture of the contemporary world forbids such certainty, at least when it comes to the certainty of a U.S. president intent on defending his country from devastating harm.

In other words, if a threatened country is to have moral permission to defend itself from attack, the Church requires that its leaders possess certainty about the threat, even as the secular culture prohibits those same leaders from having such certainty.

The logical effect of these conflicting (yet, from the point of view of the Anti-War Party, perfectly complimentary) requirements would be to paralyze President Bush. Happily, he has side-stepped the trap, avoiding the demand for an impossible degree of certainty on one side and the demand to avoid all certainty on the other. Bush may not be a mental giant, but—unlike his contemptuous critics—he operates in the Platonic metaxy, the in-between, where true understanding of reality is had.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 17, 2003 05:23 PM | Send